Say Weeeeeee!
Ahhhhhh!
Ahhhhhh!
Sunday, August 05
More Updates
Sorry, we had another database glitch just now. Fixed and working on the root cause.
Update: Aha! I screwed up the MySQL configuration directory when I was copying the old database server over, so it was running with an out-of-date config file. That led to the issue with not being able to post a few days ago, and the issue with running out of connections just now.
All is stable again.
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Saturday, August 04
Maintenance This Weekend
Doing some more server maintenance this weekend to improve performance and shut off the old server. We might have some glitches, please bear with us.
This weekend's updates brought to you by K-On!!!
Doing some more server maintenance this weekend to improve performance and shut off the old server. We might have some glitches, please bear with us.
Update: Found and fixed a couple of slow queries, and built a new index, which affected posting again but only for 12 minutes this time.
Update: We are switching servers right now! This should simply happen, but while it is happening images won't load on this site. They will load on your site, just not on this site, because I'm testing new features here. That should resolve itself soon.
Update: Waiting for DNS changes to propagate to complete the switch. I can already see the load spooling up on the new server and dying down on the old one as more people pick up the DNS change. It's kind of neat.
Update: Images are now loading here. We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.
Update: Also, performance should be back to normal:
76kb generated in CPU 0.01, elapsed 0.0159 seconds.
14 queries taking 0.0109 seconds, 25 records returned.
Update: And I accidentally shut down the old server while running final backups, but at least that proved that the new server was working...
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Daily News Stuff 4 August 2018
Dotonbori, photo by Yoshito Hasaka
Tech News
- AMD has a new APU: 4 Zen cores, 24 Vega compute units, and supporting 8GB of GDDR5 memory. (AnandTech)
Where the existing Ryzen 2400G trails behind the original Playstation 4, this new chip has almost exactly the graphics performance of the Playstation 4 Pro.
The downside: You can't have one. It's a semi-custom design for a Chinese PC and console manufacturer. We're not likely to see these as a regular PC component, because without the GDDR5 memory the fast graphics cores would starve.
As a minor note, despite the dozens of Ryzen processors across two generations now, covering desktops, laptops, workstations, servers from 8 to 64 cores, embedded systems, and now game consoles, this is only the fourth Ryzen chip. Everything else has been put together from one CPU chip (in 2017 or 2018 version) and one APU chip.
- AMD has a new range of high-end desktop chips that you will be able to buy, if you have the cash. They range from the 12 core 2920X Tiny Tadpole for $649 to the 32 core 2990WX Robot Zombie Ninja Pirate for $1799. (VideoCardz)
The 12 and 16 core models use 180W; the 24 and 32 core models use a hefty 250W. That's a lot of power and heat, but it's right in line with my Ryzen 1700, which uses 65W for 8 cores.
Fittingly, the new chips come packaged in a small toaster oven. (Fudzilla)
- Microsemi (who?) are launching PCIe 4.0 products - SSD controller chips and PCIe switches. PCIe 4.0 should start to enter general availability next year, with new CPUs and chipsets and motherboards and video cards and so on. Yes, you will need to buy everything again. And in 2020 DDR5 memory will be coming out, so you'll need to buy everything again. (AnandTech)
Or don't; things are mostly fine anyway.
- NUKE EVERYONE. THIS WILL NOT STAND.
Picture of the Day
Video of the Day
Apparently Wakfu season 3 is on Netflix. Apparently I cancelled my Netflix account BECAUSE THEY HAVE THE WORST RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM EVER AND DIDN'T TELL ME THAT.
I have seasons 1 & 2 on Blu-Ray though.
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Friday, August 03
Daily News Stuff 3 August 2018
La merlettaia, Luigi Bechi, ca. 1880
Tech News
- ASRock's X470 Taichi Ultimate Raptortronic Incineriffic Edition brings 10G Ethernet to Ryzen. (AnandTech)
- Samsung's Galaxy Tab S4 is a very expensive 10.5" tablet without a headphone jack. (AnandTech)
- Intel are planning to release a QLC NVMe SSD, the 660p. No, I don't know why either. (Tom's Hardware)
- Apple is worth one treeelion dollars. (TechCrunch)
- Intel's 10nm process is a day late and a dollar short. Or more precisely, four years late and 2nm short. Long. Whatever. (SemiAccurate)
Picture of the Day
Video of the Day
The SSI Gold Box games never looked like this!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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So....
I just got suspended on Twitter for a week for comparing Brian Stelter unfavourably to a dead goldfish.
I just got suspended on Twitter for a week for comparing Brian Stelter unfavourably to a dead goldfish.
It seems that Twitter are saying worse things about Brian there than I ever did.
Also, side note, the Facebook user interface in a mobile browser is astonishingly awful. MySpace cubed.
Also, another side note: If you log in to Twitter while you're suspended and accidentally click like, it appears they extend your suspension by five hours.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Thursday, August 02
Daily News Stuff 2 August 2018
The Young Rag Seller, Guillaume-Charles Brun, 1870
Tech News
- Google's new motto: "It's not evil if it turns a profit." (Tom's Hardware)
- Never bet against Mario. (WCCFTech)
- The problem with autoscaling: Everything scales automatically except your wallet. (Hackernoon)
- GitLab is producing a data science tool to complement their core platform. GitLab's core platform being, um, GitLab.
The goal is to be for data scientists what GitLab is for developers. Since my job spans these fields, and I like GitLab a lot, and the project is open source, I'm on board with this effort, except... "Meltano"? (GitLab)
- That Lenovo ThinkPad E485 that was available at a really good price and then went up $300 without notice is now available again for A$999 only now with 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB. Also, Ryzen 2700U models are available for an extra $100. If you're interested in a general-purpose notebook and don't need a 4K screen or dedicated GPU, this looks like a very nice all-rounder for a great price. Some of the time.
Picture of the Day
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04:43 PM
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Wednesday, August 01
Daily News Stuff 1 August 2018
Unused Soviet LK-3 lunar lander.
Tech News
- Kairosoft's Thrift Store Story is out in English. This is approximately their 347th mobile game. Most of them are good. (Not you, Fish Pond Park.)
So is Wild Park Manager. When did that happen? Hmm. April. Didn't notice. And yet, it's already installed on my tablet. How did that happen?
If you're new to Kairosoft and want to give them a try, I suggest Game Dev Story or Beastie Bay, which is free. Dungeon Village, Mega Mall Story, and Grand Prix Story are also great fun.
- Apple has many dollars. Not a lot of unit growth though - just 1% year on year - so expect them to keep increasing prices, and me to keep not buying them. (AnandTech)
- Apple stops supporting industry standards, industry stops supporting Apple. (PC Perspective)
Apple's decision to deprecate OpenGL and OpenCL was and remains shortsighted.
- AMD's new Threadripper 2990WX Ultimate Warrior Phoenix Deathclaw Niobium Ludicrous Edition Pro can hit 4GHz on all 32 cores, air cooled. Maybe. (WCCFTech)
- The bullshit web is where every page contains 5KB of text and 50MB of crap you not only don't want, but would pay to avoid. (PixelEnvy via Hacker News)
- A game of snake. Encoded on a bootable CD image. Packed into a single tweet.
- Kid kills quantum. An 18-year-old university student has come up with what looks like a classical algorithm for recommendation systems that works as well as the recently discovered quantum version, but doesn't require a time rotor to run.
- EPYC servers really want four memory channels populated to work well. This is good news, because they have eight memory channels. So with the coming doubling of core counts expected next year, we should see a doubling of performance on many tasks, and not find servers constrained by memory bandwidth.
Also, 32GB modules are cheaper than 2 x 16GB modules, and leave more room for upgrading later.
Same goes on a smaller scale for Ryzen CPUs - but not the APUs, which are already bandwidth constrained. (ServeTheHome)
So, does this mean I'd be okay buying one memory kit and upgrading both my machines to a lopsided 24GB while I wait for DRAM prices to finally come down? Maybe it does.
- Tom's Hardware lists the best productivity (i.e. non-gaming) CPU in each of five categories, from ultra-budget to high-end professional. All AMD.
This may change when Intel's 8-core chips are released (end of the year?) but even then will likely change back in AMD's favour in the first half of 2019. (Tom's Hardware)
- Lightning and financial systems don't mix. Or rather, when they do mix, you're unlikely to enjoy the results. When preparing DR strategies, make sure to include angry thunder gods in your calculations.
Picture of the Day
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Tuesday, July 31
Daily News Stuff 31 July 2018
Fly the derpy skies!
Tech News
- AnandTech reviews Intel's Xeon W. Spoiler, the final page is titled "Conclusion: Is Intel Serious About Xeon W?" (AnandTech)
- New York has kicked out Charter Communications for failing to meet agreements and this writer at Tom's Hardware is terrified that he may need to use Verizon Fios or [shudder] DSL. Because he has so few choices. And the government should do something about that. (Tom's Hardware)
Listen, bub: I live somewhere where the government did something about that. Result: I have been waiting nine years for them to upgrade my connection from DSL. I can't get cable, because they're going to run fiber - eventually. I can't get fixed 4G, because they're going to run fiber - eventually. My options are DSL or [cough] satellite - in a city of five million people.
And the DSL infrastructure hasn't been upgraded at all during that time. Because they're going to run fiber - eventually.
The only worse thing than a monopoly is a government-run monopoly.
- It's just a scratch.
Picture of the Day
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Monday, July 30
Daily News Stuff 30 July 2018
See the next post for an update on the database glitch overnight that affected all the mee.nu blogs.
Simple and practical. Just replace your atmosphere with xenon gas.
See the next post for an update on the database glitch overnight that affected all the mee.nu blogs.
Tech News
- Microsoft has a Windows update to reduce the impact of Windows updates by using a predictive AI model of user behaviour rather than, I don't know, FUCKING ASKING ME. Not that I am annoyed with Windows 10 today, not at all. (Fudzilla)
- AMD's 32-core Threadripper 2990WX Turbo Diesel Anthrax Monster Plutonium Limited Edition was listed briefly by a Canadian retailer for the equivalent of US$1835.
Intel's fastest workstation processors, the Core i9 7980XE and Xeon W-2195, have 18 cores and cost $1999 and $2500 respectively. (WCCFTech)
- You can now run vi in your browser. (No, I don't know why either.)
- Hello, World on z/OS in under a week.
- Samsung announces V-NAND 5G. Major features are more faster (1.4Gbps), less powers (down from 1.8v to 1.2v), and layers everywhere. "Over 90 layers" which probably means they tried for 96 like Toshiba but they don't all quite work. (ServeTheHome)
- My ISP has stopped showing an NBN connection date of June 29 and is now just showing "not available" with no further details. I could run Cat 5 from my house to the fiber endpoint. The one thing worse than a private company having a local monopoly on internet access is the government having a national monopoly.
Picture of the Day
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Ongoing Maintenance
So, slight problem with last night's update - there was a glitch with the config file on the new database server which meant that no-one could post new blog entries. Comments worked fine, but you couldn't post new entries.*
So, slight problem with last night's update - there was a glitch with the config file on the new database server which meant that no-one could post new blog entries. Comments worked fine, but you couldn't post new entries.*
And I was in a meeting all day today without access to the server, so I only just got a chance to find the problem and fix it.
Sorry about that.
Also, creating new posts is weirdly slow. Other things seem fine. Updating posts is fine.
I'll get that fixed tomorrow.
Uploading images is also fixed.
* The config file was correct, but somehow the server was ignoring a critical setting, which meant some specific queries just didn't work.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:18 PM
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83kb generated in CPU 0.1031, elapsed 0.3254 seconds.
57 queries taking 0.3058 seconds, 398 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
57 queries taking 0.3058 seconds, 398 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
